This chapter connects the art and science of eating well known as gastronomy to the literary and social histories of modernism. It foregrounds how modernist writers both advance and satirize gastronomic principles of good taste and refined dining, and in doing so prompt explorations of popular versus high culture and nationalism versus cosmopolitanism. The analysis compares Italian avant-garde artist and writer F.T. Marinetti’s The Futurist Cookbook (1932), Wisconsin poet Lorine Niedecker’s New Goose volume (1946), and California culinary figure M.F.K. Fisher’s cookbooks from the 1940s. The Futurist Cookbook implicitly adapts the nationalism of nineteenth-century French gastronomy to the ideology of twentieth-century fascism by promoting technologically fabricated dishes and steel-like Italian citizens. In contrast, Niedecker’s New Goose uses lyric poetry to expose the hunger of small-scale farmers during the Second World War, a period when affluent gourmands continued to patronize urban restaurants. Finally, Fisher’s cookbooks employ modernist narrative techniques in the cookbook genre while expressing dissent with the broader status of gastronomy during wartime.

In nineteenth-century Britain, a new relationship developed between eating and reading: the cookbook emerged as a commercial form; realist novelists described meals in detail; written menus appeared on dining tables in both the public and domestic spheres. The fashion in dining style also shifted, from service à la Française, in which dishes were all served at once, to service à la Russe, in which meals were served to diners in courses. Dinner had become serialized. As this chapter reminds us, Victorians consumed much of their literature in serial form, and now mealtimes mirrored the apportioned, segregated, and suspenseful qualities of serialized fiction. Because service à la Russe was timed and choreographed by servants, the serialization of the meal played a role in the privatization of social and libidinal life. This chapter also traces nineteenth-century interests in civilized and uncivilized ways of eating, and the crucial role that diet and dining played in political protest. Industrialization had produced an era of grand excess and grisly deficits; when Charles Dickens compared capitalist and cannibal appetites he exposed the end-logic of consumer culture.

Beginning with Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865) and ending with Levi Pinfold’s Greenling (2015), this chapter contends that children’s literature provides an imaginative map for navigating the global industrial food system, superimposed on colonial circuits of yore. Several narrative dynamics dramatize the appetite and vulnerability of the child’s body. For example, the racialized child is the object of predation in late nineteenth-century US fiction, and then Harlem Renaissance literature repurposes this trope to cherish the black child. In The Secret Garden (1911) and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950), white English children demonstrate and defend their virtue with hearty English repasts. In the postwar period, Green Eggs and Ham (1960) and Where the Wild Things Are (1963) imagine eating as an expression of childhood agency and rebellion. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, picture books reveal the enmeshment of the human and the nonhuman through the ecological intimacies of eating.

This chapter employs the example of the first American Thanksgiving, its facts and fictions, to explore the origins of a national sense of taste in the USA. It traces this sense of taste, equal parts gustatory and aesthetic, to a philosophy that linked personal taste to the expression of republican values and ideals which was mobilized well into the nineteenth century, as writers including Sarah Josepha Buell Hale and Lydia Maria Child employed characters who exhibited republican taste – especially at the Thanksgiving table – in order to illustrate appropriate political behavior. This chapter places Hale’s political advocacy concerning Thanksgiving, as articulated in Godey’s Lady’s Book and to the government directly, against Child’s more imaginative – and more liberatory – evocation of Thanksgiving in her story “Willie Wharton,” so as to show how Child more fully connected the symbolism of food and eating to the cultivation of personal taste. It argues, moreover, that Child demonstrates a more inclusive conception of the USA, even as it remains limited by her inclination to subsume indigenous cultural influences within an already dominant Anglo-American national identity.

This chapter surveys food and food practices in a variety of medieval texts, including Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Havelok, and the mystic visions of Julian of Norwich, as well as recent scholarship in the field of medieval food studies. It argues that literary depictions of medieval eating, feasting, and mealtime decorum offer us crucial, if often overlooked, commentaries on political power and social pretensions as well as religious practice and hypocrisy, while also revealing key aspects of medieval food culture otherwise glossed over or omitted in culinary texts from the time, including the centrality of meat carving and the multi-sensory scale of medieval banquets.

This chapter explores the ways in which the practice of cookery and the act of eating were understood as analogous to the making and experiencing of literature in early modern writing – a set of similarities that was both exciting and disquieting. It begins with the word “conceit,” which could refer either to a wittily rhetorical piece of language or to something dainty and edible. This leads to a discussion of the ways in which eating causes distinctions between people and practices both to be made and to break down in this period (especially in the work of Shakespeare and Jonson). It ends with a discussion of the place of food in the writings of Margaret Cavendish – who distinguishes her own labours from the typical culinary work of women even as she sees Nature as a productive cook – and John Milton, who places a striking emphasis on prelapsarian eating as common to human and angel, while recognizing food as the most devilish of temptations.

This chapter examines twentieth and twenty-first century US farmworker literature. It argues that US farmworker literature distinguishes itself from the Jeffersonian agrarianism dominant in literary and cultural representations of US farmers by not only exposing the systems of power and privilege through which farmworkers are exploited, but also positioning farmworkers as key conveyors of environmental knowledge. And it shows how farmworker epistemologies in US literature and culture offer a critical vantage point on both the industrial food system and the larger systems of colonialism, capitalism, and racism upon which the industrial food system relies. The chapter considers Sanora Babb’s Whose Names Are Unknown (1939), Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart (1946), and Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus (1995) as examples of farmworker literature that both address the conditions of exploitation facing farm laborers in the industrial food system, including economic and environmental violence, and foreground farmworkers’ environmental knowledge.

This chapter explores Julia Child’s role in the “hot kitchen” of Cold War culture, and her unlikely repurposing of the trans-national domestic front. Recent commentators have suggested that the OSS researcher, food writer, TV celebrity, and domestic goddess single-handedly “re-outfitted the American kitchen and re-educated the American palate.” In the heyday of Jello molds and frozen foods, she made French cooking hot. But when Julia arrived in France in 1948, the country was scarred by war and reeling from deprivation – was, in other words, far from a foodie paradise. Child’s memoirs reveal her keen awareness of postwar scarcity, and the postwar politics of being an American in Paris in the age of both McCarthy and the Marshall Plan. Reading My Life in France alongside Mastering the Art of French Cooking and Child's collected letters, I uncover how her work to translate French cuisine for an American audience pivotally upended Cold War domestic ideology, countering narratives of American modernity and postwar abundance with visions of French leisure, luxury, and culinary extravagance.

When it comes to food and race, the connection is often one of identity: how the one comes to stand in for the other and vice versa. This chapter invites readers to theorize food and consumption in Asian American literature by attending to food, not as an expression of identity, but as that which profoundly destabilizes (and perhaps even dissolves) identity and by questioning the association between food as matter and race as matter. It focuses on the tropes of ingestion, farming, and environmental and human health in On Such a Full Sea, Chang-rae Lee’s most and least Asian American novel, as a way to meditate on the nature of racial/ethnic (im)materiality. By turning to the crises of food and ecology as sites that trouble the division between the human and the animal, the consumer and the consumed, Lee forces us to reconsider our easy assumptions about racial-ethnic identity and the corporeal integrity that presumably substantiates that identity.

This chapter examines contemporary African fiction through the lens of food and foodways, highlighting the ways that recent writers have deployed agriculture, cooking, and eating to highlight the traumas of history, the emptiness of displacement, and the power of community. In We Need New Names (2013) NoViolet Bulawayo uses a piece of half-eaten discarded pizza to indicate the cultural and economic distance between those Zimbabweans with access to America and Europe and those without. Rosa’s District 6 (2004) by Rozena Maart shows the way food acts to bring people of different faiths and races together in a community facing erasure under apartheid. In Aminatta Forna’s Ancestor Stones (2006), the revival of a coffee plantation serves as a metaphor for the rebuilding of Sierra Leone after decades of military coups and a civil war. In all three novels, food is used to chart political and social history unique to each region. Foodways and food security can serve as important markers in ascertaining how liberation is proceeding because access to food is a basic human necessity and foodways serve as cultural and social markers that speak to a community’s comfort with its access to food.

This chapter introduces the reader to literary representations of food as well as the literary facets of culinary texts ranging from early modern receipt books and nineteenth-century cookbooks to contemporary culinary memoirs and food blogs. It highlights the complexities of food culture and foregrounds the role that food has played in the formation of racial identities, gendered bodies, national tastes, cultural memory, and social capital. Tracing the rich range of historical and theoretical approaches to literary food studies that have emerged over the past two decades, it offers an overview of how food and its literature came to be taken seriously by literary scholars. Finally, this section establishes the parameters of the Companion, and provides a chapter-by-chapter introduction to its contents.

In the late nineteenth century, cookbooks began to describe in detail a heteronormative economy in which a wife was cooking for her husband and family in return for the love, financial security, respect, and protection her husband provided. This ideological frame, brought about by social change in household structure and the distribution of labor, helped to establish cooking and eating as modes to narrate changing sexual economies in the twentieth century. This chapter tracks the historical development of heteronormativity in cooking advice as well as how literary texts have exploited the idea of cooking as central to the performance of hegemonic femininity, and also occasionally contested that idea. It also discusses how the heternormativity of cookbooks was sometimes questioned by authors of cooking advice. Not only did cookbook authors start to challenge the gender binary traditionally promoted in cookbooks as well as the normative assumption that women prepare food for the men they love, but they also innovatively reformulated the rules of the genre, thereby making its normative claims visible while creating a space to narrate alternative tales of love and sexuality.

From the turn of the twentieth century forward, movie makers, fiction writers, and journalists have increasingly pushed into view bodies mangled by agricultural machinery, workers drowning in silos filled with grain, and lands laden with synthetic toxins. Farms have frequently appeared not only as ideal homesteads near picturesque villages but also as cogs in the brutality of corporate agribusiness, or as isolated and alien outposts struggling for economic survival in depopulated landscapes. The farm has even grown into a privileged setting for stories of supernatural horror bound to the rise of agriculture’s industrialization. Tangled with images of terror and mutilated bodies, Thomas Jefferson’s once idyllic “labor in the earth” now often takes place on a threatening, quasi-industrial, vast and lonely landscape of corn. Texts examined include Frank Norris' The Octopus, H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Picture in the House,” Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and Stephen King’s “The Children of the Corn.”